arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 24, 2026 — 19:39:45 EST
Language places subtle constraints on how we make inductive inferences. Developmental evidence by Gelman et al. (2002) has shown children (4 years and older) to differentiate among generic statements ("Bears are daxable"), universally quantified NPs ("all bears are daxable") and indefinite plural NPs ("some bears are daxable") in...
Multimodal video captioning condenses dense footage into a structured format of keyframes and natural language. By creating a cohesive multimodal summary, this approach anchors generative AI in rich semantic evidence and serves as a lightweight proxy for high-efficiency retrieval. However, traditional metrics like BLEU or ROUGE fail...
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to support human decision-making. This use of LLMs has concerning implications, especially when their prescriptions affect the welfare of others. To gauge how LLMs make social decisions, we explore whether five leading models produce sensible strategies in the repeated prisoner's...
We describe a novel system, CSQL, which automatically converts a collection of unstructured text documents into an SQL-queryable causal database (CDB). A CDB differs from a traditional DB: it is designed to answer "why'' questions via causal interventions and structured causal queries. CSQL builds on our earlier system, DEMOCRITUS,...
Despite notable advancements in prompting methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), existing strategies still suffer from excessive token usage and limited generalisability across diverse reasoning tasks. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought (ACPS)...
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from pre-collected datasets, avoiding costly and risky online interactions, but it often struggles with long-horizon tasks involving sparse rewards. Existing goal-conditioned and hierarchical offline RL methods decompose such tasks and generate intermediate rewards to...
We investigate algorithms with predictions in computational geometry, specifically focusing on the basic problem of computing 2D Delaunay triangulations. Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane and a triangulation $G$ that serves as a "prediction" of the Delaunay triangulation, we would like to use $G$ to compute the correct...
Retrieval-augmented generation with tool-calling agents (agentic RAG) has become increasingly powerful in understanding, processing, and responding to user queries. However, the scope of the grounding knowledge is limited and asking questions that exceed this scope may lead to issues like hallucination. While guardrail frameworks aim...
Electrical activity in fungal mycelium has been reported in numerous species and experimental contexts, yet its spatial organisation and propagation remain insufficiently characterised. In this study we investigate the spatiotemporal structure of electrical potential dynamics in oyster mushroom (\textit{Pleurotus ostreatus}) mycelium...
Reward modeling is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences, yet predominant architectures rely on a static pooling strategy to condense sequences into scalar scores. This paradigm, however, suffers from two key limitations: a static inductive bias that misaligns with task-dependent preference signals, and a...
In this paper, we present an automated pipeline for generating domain-specific synthetic datasets with diffusion models, addressing the distribution shift between pre-trained models and real-world deployment environments. Our three-stage framework first synthesizes target objects within domain-specific backgrounds through controlled...
Subject-independent EEG emotion recognition is challenged by pronounced inter-subject variability and the difficulty of learning robust representations from short, noisy recordings. To address this, we propose a fusion framework that integrates (i) local, channel-wise descriptors and (ii) global, trial-level descriptors, improving...
Firmware integrity is a foundational requirement for securing Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), where malicious or compromised firmware can result in persistent backdoors, unauthorized control, or catastrophic system failures. Traditional verification mechanisms such as secure boot, digital signatures, and centralized hash databases are...
Public large language models (LLMs) are typically safety-aligned during pretraining, yet task-specific fine-tuning required for deployment often erodes this alignment and introduces safety risks. Existing defenses either embed safety recovery into fine-tuning or rely on fine-tuning-derived priors for post-hoc correction, leaving...
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) in smart homes is critical for health monitoring and assistive living. While vision-based systems are common, they face privacy concerns and environmental limitations (e.g., occlusion). In this work, we present MobiDiary, a framework that generates natural language descriptions of daily activities...
Extended reality serious games for mental health are a promising research avenue to address the accessibility gap in mental health treatment by bringing therapy to patients in their homes, offering highly adaptable and immersive yet safe therapy opportunities, and increasing motivation and engagement with therapeutic exercises....
Recently, self-play fine-tuning (SPIN) has been proposed to adapt large language models to downstream applications with scarce expert-annotated data, by iteratively generating synthetic responses from the model itself. However, SPIN is designed to optimize the current reward advantages of annotated responses over synthetic responses...
Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), defined as fluent yet incorrect or incoherent outputs, pose a significant challenge to the automatic generation of educational multiple-choice questions (MCQs). We identified four key hallucination types in MCQ generation: reasoning inconsistencies, insolvability, factual errors, and...
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into autonomous agents has enabled complex tool use, yet in high-stakes domains, these systems must strictly adhere to regulatory standards beyond simple functional correctness. However, existing benchmarks often overlook implicit regulatory compliance, thus failing to evaluate whether...
Conversational agents are increasingly expected to adapt across contexts and evolve their personalities through interactions, yet most remain static once configured. We present an exploratory study of how user expectations form and evolve when agent personality is made dynamically adjustable. To investigate this, we designed a...
Aggregating multi-site brain MRI data can enhance deep learning model training, but also introduces non-biological heterogeneity caused by site-specific variations (e.g., differences in scanner vendors, acquisition parameters, and imaging protocols) that can undermine generalizability. Recent retrospective MRI harmonization seeks to...
We investigate learned KV cache compression through Speculative Importance Prediction (SIP), a 1.7M parameter non-query-aware scorer that predicts token importance from KV representations alone. Despite architectural sophistication (multi-horizon lookahead, cross-attention), SIP does not outperform simple baselines, including random...
Medical image analysis increasingly relies on large vision-language models (VLMs), yet most systems remain single-pass black boxes that offer limited control over reasoning, safety, and spatial grounding. We propose R^4, an agentic framework that decomposes medical imaging workflows into four coordinated agents: a Router that...
Lightweight vision networks have witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, yet achieving a satisfactory balance among parameter scale, computational overhead, and task performance remains difficult. Although many existing lightweight models manage to reduce computation considerably, they often do so at the expense of a...
Existing invasive (backdoor) fingerprints suffer from high-perplexity triggers that are easily filtered, fixed response patterns exposed by heuristic detectors, and spurious activations on benign inputs. We introduce \textsc{ForgetMark}, a stealthy fingerprinting framework that encodes provenance via targeted unlearning. It builds a...